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Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Every book has a slice of something really delicious in it that when it finally enters you, just makes you feel so good. I just had that moment, and my next book is done, haha--I mean I haven't written it yet, but the key lime pie slice that is the basic “idea” (not even quite the right word, it involves a movement of emotion and a flavor) is there. Federico Campagna I'm looking at you :)

To understand why I say this, you need to realize that most — not all, but most — of what you’ve heard about Greek profligacy and irresponsibility is false. Yes, the Greek government was spending beyond its means in the late 2000s. But since then it has repeatedly slashed spending and raised taxes. Government employment has fallen more than 25 percent, and pensions (which were indeed much too generous) have been cut sharply. If you add up all the austerity measures, they have been more than enough to eliminate the original deficit and turn it into a large surplus.

So why didn’t this happen? Because the Greek economy collapsed, largely as a result of those very austerity measures, dragging revenues down with it.

And this collapse, in turn, had a lot to do with the euro, which trapped Greece in an economic straitjacket. Cases of successful austerity, in which countries rein in deficits without bringing on a depression, typically involve large currency devaluations that make their exports more competitive. This is what happened, for example, in Canada in the 1990s, and to an important extent it’s what happened in Iceland more recently. But Greece, without its own currency, didn’t have that option. --Paul Krugman

Monday, June 29, 2015

acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence. Don’t be taken in by claims that troika officials are just technocrats explaining to the ignorant Greeks what must be done. These supposed technocrats are in fact fantasists who have disregarded everything we know about macroeconomics, and have been wrong every step of the way. This isn’t about analysis, it’s about power — the power of the creditors to pull the plug on the Greek economy, which persists as long as euro exit is considered unthinkable.
So it’s time to put an end to this unthinkability. Otherwise Greece will face endless austerity, and a depression with no hint of an end.
--Paul Krugman

Friday, June 26, 2015

You just ripped it up, my friends, in Espacio X in back of the Cathedral here in Mexico City. Both in different ways were exercises in tuning electromagnetic waves, louder, louder, and louder, sounding out the objects in the room, and the room--one of those objects being us, the listeners, as the sound became more and more physical, giving up its pressure wave status onto the surfaces, and indeed beneath the surfaces, of one's body.

I have never seen a laser fired at a pile of dirt on a custom made tone generator before. I have never seen water poured on a laser fired at a pile of dirt on a custom made tone generator before. I have never seen a sparkler lit underneath a laser etc etc. Martin...

And Victor, the frog in the slowly boiling water. If I had detected that level of infrasound at that volume spontaneously, round a corner, I would not have gone around that corner. But somehow you kept me in the room as the volume went up and up.

Mind you--I'm quite well trained. I reckon we were up at about 110 decibels. My Bloody Valentine goes over 120 on a regular basis, and I'm pretty sure that midsection of “You Made Me Realise” hits about 130. People were throwing up, running out of the room, clutching their ears--and they were already wearing earplugs. The decibel scale is logarithmic, so 130 is way way more than 120. It's why I wrote this essay called “Beauty Is Death.”

Somehow I got that same feeling from Mazón's Subcutáneo. Death around the corner, quietly throbbing: physical disintegration not imminent but about to be looming, like realizing you are possibly falling towards a black hole that is still quite far off.

Howse's Substrate was an alchemical translation-interpretation of objects by objects by objects...a nonstop pile of resonating physicality. Wow.

Thanks to those who found this and told me. I pay so very little attention to how my stuff is circulating so I'm really glad to find this interesting piece on the Pope's rather extraordinarily Franciscan encyclical. Somehow Ornette Coleman makes it in there, and that's interesting, because Björk had shared with me Derrida's interview of him to inspire us in the last few days of our project.

You asked for it! There are not a lot of surprises in the syllabus. What is surprising is the way we do the class. Or did--now I teach a version at Rice, but the classes are much smaller, down to about 10 from 100! So my teaching is different.

ENL45
Introduction to Poetry: How to Read Any Poem, Anywhere
Professor Timothy Morton

Grading: two short papers (45%), one exam (20%), homework and participation (35%).

What is a poem? Why is reading poetry important? Are there techniques of reading that anyone can learn and apply? In this class we shall study a wide range of poetry with a view to understanding how to read poems. This class will set you up for life, and certainly for the scope of your undergraduate career. Say goodbye to close reading anxiety. This class will sort you out.

Requirements:
2 essays. Four pages, double spaced, 12-point font. NO secondary texts.
Essay 1: Due 2.9. Close reading of ONE short poem or a SMALL part of a longer one (you will be taught how to do this).
Essay 2: Due 3.15. Close reading of ONE short poem or a SMALL part of a longer one (you will be taught how to do this).
You can do as many drafts of Essay 1 as you like. If you hand it in on or before the due date, you can revise it as many times as you like until the final class.
Homework. Homework is set for each class. On the syllabus below, you will find the homework for each particular class at the end of the entry for that class.
•Homework exercises.
oYou will be required to write something short. Bring your answers in for discussion.
oYou will be called on at random in class and we will check your name off.
oYou will be called on at random for written work and we will check your name off.
oThere is a 5% extra credit for homework. Higher points will be given if you hand in your homework on or close to its due date.
Attendance. Non-attendance must be excused by Doctor's note or religious holiday.
oAttendance also means taking care of yourself and others and being aware of your environment in class.
oAttendance also includes the following: No mobile phones; No eating.
Reading! You won't be able to keep up with this class unless you do all of it.
Participation.
oParticipation includes reading aloud, speaking mindfully, being aware of others in your environment and being kind to yourself and others.
oIdentify yourself when you speak!
Final Exam. 2 close readings and terminology. Blue books please.
Students with disabilities: please contact me and every effort will be made to accommodate you.
January 10. Class 1. Rendezvous.

January 12. Class 2. Structure and space.Charles Bernstein, “THIS POEM INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.”John Ashbery, from The System.e.e. cummings, “spring is like a perhaps hand.”

January 17. Class 3. Structure: lineation and stanza form.George Herbert, “Easter Wings.”Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” from Leaves of Grass.Brenda Iijima, “(a brittle day passed by).”
Homework: using two words on one page, arrange them in three different ways. Describe the effects of doing so.

February 28. Class 15. Narrative 1: plot and story.John Milton, from Paradise Lost (1.1–125).Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Homework: write a four-line poem that forces the reader to read it from the subject position of a stupid but very rich playboy.

We have become chair vectors. Chairs are a virus we reproduce for no good reason.

BMC Public Health issued the following news release about a new study finding a link between sitting and increased anxiety:

Increased Anxiety Associated With Sitting Down

Low energy activities that involve sitting down are associated with an increased risk of anxiety, according to research published in BMC Public Health.

These activities, which include watching TV, working at a computer or playing electronic games, are called sedentary behavior. Further understanding of these behaviors and how they may be linked to anxiety could help in developing strategies to deal with this mental health problem.

Many studies have shown that sedentary behavior is associated with physical health problems like obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis. However, there has been little research into the link between sedentary behavior and mental health. This is the first systematic review to examine the relationship between anxiety and sedentary behavior.

Anxiety is a mental health illness that affects more than 27 million people worldwide. It is a debilitating illness that can result in people worrying excessively and can prevent people carrying out their daily life. It can also result in physical symptoms, which amongst others includes pounding heartbeat, difficulty breathing, tense muscles, and headaches.

Megan Teychenne, lead researcher and lecturer at Deakin University's Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research (C-PAN) in Australia, said: "Anecdotally - we are seeing an increase in anxiety symptoms in our modern society, which seems to parallel the increase in sedentary behavior. Thus, we were interested to see whether these two factors were in fact linked. Also, since research has shown positive associations between sedentary behavior and depressive symptoms, this was another foundation for further investigating the link between sedentary behavior and anxiety symptoms."

C-PAN researchers analyzed the results of nine studies that specifically examined the association between sedentary behavior and anxiety. The studies varied in what they classified as sedentary behavior from television viewing/computer use to total sitting time, which included sitting while watching television, sitting while on transport and work-related sitting. Two of the studies included children/adolescents while the remaining seven included adults.

It was found in five of the nine studies that an increase in sedentary behavior was associated with an increased risk of anxiety. In four of the studies it was found that total sitting time was associated with increased risk of anxiety. The evidence about screen time (TV and computer use) was less strong but one study did find that 36% of high school students that had more than 2 hours of screen time were more like to experience anxiety compared to those who had less than 2 hours.

The C-PAN team suggests the link between sedentary behavior and anxiety could be due to disturbances in sleep patterns, social withdrawal theory and poor metabolic health. Social withdrawal theory proposes that prolonged sedentary behavior, such as television viewing, can lead to withdrawal from social relationships, which has been linked to increased anxiety. As most of the studies included in this systematic-review were cross-sectional the researchers say more follow-up work studies are required to confirm whether or not anxiety is caused by sedentary behavior.

Megan Teychenne said: "It is important that we understand the behavioral factors that may be linked to anxiety - in order to be able to develop evidence-based strategies in preventing/managing this illness. Our research showed that evidence is available to suggest a positive association between sitting time and anxiety symptoms - however, the direction of this relationship still needs to be determined through longitudinal and interventional studies."

After Biopolitics, the 2015–16 Seminar, will expore how and why “life” in the broadest sense has become a central topic of politics over the past few decades.

The seminar will be led by Cary Wolfe, the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor in English and director of the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory, and Timothy Morton, the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English.

Over the past 30 years, no paradigm has become more central to understanding our own moment than the paradigm of biopolitics—a fact that has left hardly any discipline untouched, resulting in new formations such as bioart, bioethics, biotechnology, biomedia, biocapital, bioinformatics, biovalue and biocomputing among many others. The reasons for this are not hard to see: the engineering, domestication and commodification of life in the era of synthetic biology, at a level scarcely thinkable 50 years ago; rapid depletion of the earth's resources in the context of global warming in what used to be called the first world; seemingly endless debates over the political and economic complexities of health care, social security, lengthening retirement ages and dwindling personal savings rates in the developed West; confrontations over abortion and immigration in the U.S., in which the concepts of life and race are never far from view; and the post-9/11 context of the war on terror and ongoing anxieties about security resulting in the normalization of spaces and practices of judicial exception such as Guantanamo Bay, drone warfare and electronic surveillance at a level heretofore unknown. Add to these an increasing awareness of the plight of nonhuman life, whether in discussions of animal rights, factory farming and the bioengineering of nonhuman creatures or in the increasingly undeniable fact of the sixth major extinction event in the history of the planet. In the face of such developments, the seminar seeks to reexamine the theoretical, cultural, social and political underpinnings of the biopolitical paradigm and to explore conceptual resources for the possibility of thinking what has been the intersection of life and the political as a potential space of affinity, community and creativity.

The Rice Seminars program is an initiative of the Office of the Dean of Humanities and is funded by the School of Humanities and the Humanities Research Center.

For more information about the Rice Seminars, visit hrc.rice.edu/riceseminars.

The insect-headed worker-wife will hang her waspies on the line
The husband burns his paper, sucks his pipe while studying their 'causehion-floor
His viscous poly-paste breath comes out
Their wall-paper world is shattered by his shout
A boy in blue is busy banging out a headache on the kitchen door
And all the while Graham slept on
Dreaming of a world where he could do just what he wanted to

No thugs in our house are there, dear?
We made that clear
We made little Graham promise us he'd be a good boy, oh
No thugs in our house are there, dear?
We made that clear
We made little Graham promise us he'd be a good boy

The young policeman who just can't grow a moustache will open up his book
And spoil their breakfast with reports of Asians who have been so badly kicked
Is this your son's wallet I've got here?
He must have dropped it after too much beer
Oh, officer, we can't believe our little angel is the one you've picked
And all the while Graham slept on
Dreaming of a world where he could do just what he wanted to

No thugs in our house are there, dear?
We made that clear
We made little Graham promise us he'd be a good boy, oh
No thugs in our house are there, dear?
We made that clear
We made little Graham promise us he'd be a good boy

They never read those pamphlets in his bottom drawer
They never read that tattoo on his arm
They thought that was just a boys' club badge he wore
They never thought he'd cause folks any harm

The insect-headed worker wife will hang her waspies on the line
She's singing something stale and simple, now this business has fizzled out
Her little tune is such a happy song
Her son is innocent, he can't do wrong
'Cause dad's a judge and knows exactly what the job of judging's all about
And all the while Graham slept on
Dreaming of a world where he could do just what he wanted to

No thugs in our house are there, dear?
We made that clear
We made little Graham promise us he'd be a good boy, oh
No thugs in our house are there, dear?
We made that clear
We made little Graham promise us he'd be a good boy
No thugs in our house
No thugs in our house
No thugs in our house, dear

Sunday, June 21, 2015

...of right wing Catholics over here striving to put the Pope in a box. He is, after all, called Francis. What else were you expecting? Strange how when it comes to caring for nonhumans, it all becomes a matter of choice rather than ethical obligation for people otherwise committed to blindly following authority, just because it's authority.

By Avital Ronell and Alphonso Lingis. Wow, I could hardly think of more brilliant and important scholars to endorse our little Buddhism project:

“I have contemplated and endured NOTHING for so long that it did not seem right to break my practice or offer other readers something like insight, possibly a moment of sense-making and affirmation. But I break out of my trance to assert the emphatic necessity of this book, so erudite without loading us down, relentless in its ability to resignify. Sassy, brilliant, a genuine engagement with and of thought, this work tunes us to a thrilling, endorphinating way of thinking: my drug of choice.”—Avital Ronell, New York University

“The reader will delight in two important aspects of Nothing: a multitude of contemporary Buddhist responses to the great political and social changes that have affected Asian countries—imperialism, colonialism, communism, corporate capitalism—and rigorous elaboration of Lacanian psychoanalysis with Buddhist psychology. This book is exceptional.”—Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

...that Napoleon didn't win the Battle of Waterloo and thus create the USE, the United States of Europe, obviating WW1 and the existence of Hitler, the rise of the EU and the imposition of (hahaha) “austerity.” That's right UK, I am a traitor...

Not everything can be seen, and if by "seen" we mean capable of being translated perfectly into data, not everything can be empirically observed. There are some things that are thinkable and computable, yet we find it impossible to see them: the hyperobjects. Many of these things at present are ecological phenomena such as global warming, evolution and extinction, not to mention the human species and the biosphere.

We tend to think of such things as wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. But in this talk I'm going to show that they are less than the sum of their parts. I call this property subscendence, which is like transcendence upside-down. Wholes are subscended by their parts. The idea that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts is a retweet of monotheism, itself a product of the agricultural logistics that eventually gave rise to industry and therefore to the Anthropocene with its global warming and its latest economic incarnation, neoliberalism.

When we compete over whose vision of neoliberalism is bigger and badder, we are still being monotheists imprisoned in Mesopotamian space. The political task we face is to see physically gigantic and intellectually complex (hence invisible) things as ontologically tiny. Neoliberalism is physically vast but ontologically small. We are able to subscend it, by crawling out from underneath in solidarity with the other lifeforms it now threatens.

...you find yourself in a library...Jeffrey Kripal pointed this out to me, how fantastic is that, the way in which hermeneutical uncertainty is keyed into the most mystical part of Interstellar...you find yourself in a library where you have to use code to communicate, where your screams can't be heard by the person on the other side, as if you were communicating from the realm the books point towards (literally). An astronaut in a library--there's a strong allusion to 2001, that final scene with its eighteenth-century weirdness, no?

Like you plummet into the most obscure most dense most frightening part of the universe, at the point of the story when all is supposedly revealed--and you find yourself in your daughter's library, behind the bookshelves...trying to figure out how to use language...

The exchange between the robot TARS (anagram of STAR, clearly a luciferian angel) and Cooper in that scene is just too good. “Cooper, come in Cooper...” “TARS?” “Copy that.” “You survived.” “Somewhere, in their fifth dimension; they saved us.” ... “Do you have the quantum data?” “Roger I have it...”

TARS's voice actor is particularly good. Does anyone else notice how, when Romilly is killed, TARS regresses to a primitive computer voice, not quite Speak and Spell but definitely like the Apple voices? “Romilly did not survive...I could not save him.” An AI regressing because of the intensity. Nice touch.

I like to point out how OOO objects aren't naked, that they are surrounded by hermeneutical clouds of unknowing structural to their being. Like when you are having a mystical or paranormal experience, the idea that you are in a fiction can become overwhelming...thus making it easy to dismiss...

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

The current issue of art/fashion mag Sleek (“Silent Spring”) has an interview with me and Julian Charrière, by Tomasz Kobialka, on Julian's work and my hyperobjects and more and more--it's really nice to read it in print.

Also--Nadim Samman of Rare Earth fame does an interview a few pages later...

I suppose everyone has something like it. This is Allan Holdsworth on David Hines's “Antilla,” an extraordinarily nice blend of something like late 70s Weather Report with disco being collapsed into 3/4 yet embellished with dimension-crossing grace notes that make you wonder whether there is a time signature at all...

Holdsworth is so devoted to attuning to the chord sequence and working out all the possibilities in that space, in swift legato style--something very movingly, introvertedly, non-aggressively immensely powerful about it. And he just keeps pouring out more and more notes per beat.

There is something nice about the oscillation between falling into the chord sequence of the other musicians, then soaring above it. He allows the guitar to succumb to the sequence, then pulls it upwards as if attaching a gigantic kite to it. Sort of genius surrendering. Overall, the impression seems to be some kind of courageous, unstoppable benevolence. And the keyboards seem to respond to the joy.

And in general, I'm a sucker for rapid major–minor transitions, from John Dowland to techno, so it has that going for it.

It's the title of my essay in the first issue of the beautiful LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture. It's about OOO and the concept of wildness, of course. I was asked to request some images to go along with it, and they made good on that, really really well:

An ear of wheat
Footprint on the moon
A rusty nail
Yoko Ono's "This Is Not Here"
The eye of a mallard

Sunday, June 7, 2015

The OOO reality is one where there is fundamental freedom and fundamental contingency. Iron necessity (formalized as Newtonian physics) and Axial Age angry old men in the sky who want to kill you are totally out.

Even a being like that couldn't grasp a single Coke bottle top in its entirety. Or iridescent beetle wing case.

"Welcome to Modalities 2015! This year’s theme is inspired by the different –alities that proliferate in humanities scholarship, many of which have become mainstays in the critical vocabularies associated with emerging schools of theory. For example, terms like animality, materiality, corporeality, vitality, and environmentality have gained renewed traction with scholars interested in materialist, critical animal, biopolitical, and ecological theories as they continue to develop.

This conference is designed to accommodate insightful work on –alities as you have used them in your own projects, as well as “meta-”theoretical and philosophical conversations about the –alities that interest you. For more information please consult our call for papers.

You can submit abstracts now through 25 June. We hope you’ll join us in exploring our partiality for –alities this September. You can contact us directly at contact@modalities2015.com."

Belief in an all powerful external being such as an Axial Age God or the modern incarnations such as neoliberalism might not have brought a lot of happiness to the world...so what is the best way of not believing?

The best way would require the least amount of effort. Which is why proving that you must be an atheist isn't as good as showing that even if one does exist, it's irrelevant that a very powerful external being exists.

An external monotheistic deity couldn't be omniscient, omnipresent or omnipotent according to OOO.

It's better to think this as a non-theism rather than atheism. Many atheisms are still shadow monotheisms.

Awesome. He is saying exactly what I've been arguing in Dark Ecology and in my essay “Elementally” (hi Jeffrey Cohen!) for a future collection.

Anxiety is how I experience myself as an OOO “object,” not as Dasein in the sense that I am a destinal being unlike a frog or a potato or a fork who gets to impose will on frogs and so on. Object in the sense of ungraspable yet real, not captured by modes of access (such as what Campagna here means by “language”).

How this is bending towards an argument about how to proceed politically is also uncannily like what has been going on in my work...

I couldn't be physically present (only on video and in text) at the Extinction Marathon, because I was working with Björk and SonicActs. I would've so dug being in this session.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

"Cole also claims that artists and architects only read Speculative Realism because they misunderstand it, and really think that it’s about doing what all disciplines have always already done when they talked about objects and their histories. This is condescending on Cole’s part toward artists and architects, and also incorrect, as I can assure him from my discussions with hundreds of artists and architects. There’s been brewing resentment in the humanities at how OOO in particular has taken off in disciplines outside philosophy, and corresponding attempts to belittle the intellectual skills of my readers in those fields." --Graham Harman

I know, I know, I shouldn't like this, because Elon Musk etc etc. At least it's better than, and a lot trippier than, geoengineering. In any case:

1. Courage is the one emotion bound to make me go a bit blubby when I get to witness it. Even a robot that looks like a gigantic packet of Dunhill has a certain reliability and rugged charm in that regard. And the guy from Dallas Buyers Club is really kicking it here. Again! I mean look what he did in Dallas!

2. Texas rectifies the problems created by New England, in the shape of the respective male actors. If you want to save the world, at least according to Hollywood, Texans might be a good option: they know how to bend the rules to get it done.

3. Lion King composer: way to adapt the Dies Irae! Bending it towards survival!

Everywhere has a different skill. The English are apparently very good at showing you to the exit in a calm way during an emergency. The Californians are exquisitely good at talking explicitly about your (and everyone else's) pleasure, which by the way is why the English should sign a contract that forbids them from speaking at all while living in California: there is something obscene about English people talking about pleasure. And this kind of thing below might be the enlightened aspect of Texas. That and the fact that Texas is basically Mexico. Initiate!

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci